Well, well, well, who saw this coming?

I took a well-earned break from the translation duties to look at the news and was just in time to see the Orange One get the 34th guilty charge. It’s not difficult, and more than a little frightening, to imagine what will happen next: Trump and/or his supporters will go on about how it was all a fix, the judge was a criminal, the authority of the court is compromised, the jurors were all Democrats, Biden/CrookedHilary/FakeNews/hydroxychloroquine… The schism between normality and unhinged will grow wider, there’ll be riots in the streets, people will walk around with swastika flags and nooses… no, wait a minute, that was Ottawa. Regardless, it’ll be a mess and there is little hope for a rational outcome.

Or maybe there is? I mean, I have to admit to being surprised there were 12 jurors impartial enough to look at the evidence and not the politics. I know that sounds a completely paranoid thing to say, but I have little or no trust in the American political system and even less in the legal system (insofar as they can be separated at all). When I heard that any decision from the jury had to be unanimous or else it would be a hung jury, I automatically assumed that that would be the outcome. But I was wrong. So, if there is enough decency and honestly there, there may well be throughout the country. Maybe this will all be met with a shrug of the shoulders and a “well, he sure had me fooled”… but, somehow, I doubt it. As happy as I am that someone has held Trump to account – and I long for the day when the current crop of British Tory MPs face similar charges for embezzlement and corruption – we are not out of the woods yet. But it is a start.

In the real world, Ottawacker Jr is still off school but has brightened somewhat following the antibiotics. He isn’t well enough to play football tonight, but he might make the big tournament on Sunday. And, as for me, I kept my head down in a translation all day. I realized halfway through the day that I had been mistranslating one of the terms – “prêt à la carboneutralité” is the preferred term for “net zero ready” – but after a quick search and replace, my honour was restored.